Animation Final Blog

Animation Year In Review                       

In this year of ecomm, I learned many new things. I got more comfortable with many of the programs we’ve used over the years. I learned about the more in-depth parts of Maya and After Effects. I used many tutorials on many of my projects, and I was able to use those skills on other projects.  For example, I learned how to manipulate vertexes more easily. With that skill, many new possibilities for my projects opened up. Those skills were important because it allowed me to work out parts of my projects more easily.

My biggest improvement is that I don’t have to look up or ask as many questions.  I started to remember parts of Maya and after effects that I previously had to look up or ask someone.  This year I was able to start up new projects easier, because of my amount of experience with the programs.

This year in animation my weaknesses and strengths became clearer.  One of my greatest weaknesses is coming up with ideas or concepts for projects. I find it is very difficult to come up with an idea that I think will work. I will start an idea and find out later that it is too ambitious or complicated. I found that I work best when we have a project in which were told specifically what to do. That way I don’t have to waste time coming up with an effective idea. One of my biggest strengths is keeping details true to source material. Whether it’s my baseball field or my light saber, I feel that one of my strengths is keeping the details of those objects consistent to the actual items. I go to great lengths to translate the details of the actual items to my projects.

The many skills that I acquired over this year allowed me to many to do more things with my projects. They allowed me to do things that I believed to be too difficult in the past. For example I can easily work with many different shapes and tools.  Where as in the past I was limited to the basic shapes and tools. I will also be able to use those skills in the future as well as expand on those skills. Things or tasks that are difficult for me now will become easier in the future, just like how I’m good at things now that I used to be stumped with. During this year I worked on modeling many different items for a collaboration project with Zac Schuh. A modeled a human, a desk, and other simple props. The human took the most time, however they all took a good amount of time and effort to complete. During the semester i learned many different things while trying to model different things. During the making of the human, I learned how to model human body parts.I got better at making and fitting custom textures for both the human and my other projects. I also learned how to rig human parts in maya, and when the rigs did not work properly, I fixed them by learning to paint weights. I also learned the important lesson of not trying to make things too realistic, but instead make it your own style, because when you strive for realism it is more easy to notice things that are out of place or incorrect. After rigging snd painting weights, I learned how to move the human parts in semi-realistic ways. So struggles I had was making the textures fit in different items. I found it hard to find the right texture size so that it was right size and it was rotated the right way. I also struggled with painting weights. I would have all the joints working accept one, but that one would throw a wrench into the works, and when I would fix that one joint another joint would get messed up and it was a long process to fix all of them. 
         One of the main things I would change about this year was my human project. Looking back on it, it was way too ambitious and complicated for it too be realistically a thing I could do. I sunk so much time into that project and I wish that I could go back and tell myself that I needed to stop. It was ultimately I waste of my time.

So that is basically my junior year in nutshell. I learned a lot of new things. I also refined some old things I knew previously.  So basically, besides a few missteps, it was a pretty good year.